CFOs taking on a growing number of responsibilities depend more on artificial intelligence and other technologies to help them mine the insights they need for making critical decisions. As finance chiefs deploy such tools, their biggest challenge is change management, Maria Montenegro, CEO for the Corporate Performance and ESG Division at Wolters Kluwer.

It’s “not easy to change how people work and adapt to new processes and ways of working,” Montenegro said. In a recent global survey of finance chiefs, Wolters Kluwer found 53% of CFOs are taking ownership of digital transformation — and 27% of finance chiefs cite “resistance to change and cultural factors” as the biggest hurdle to that transformation.

To ease that resistance, “it can't be a tech-led transformation,” Montenegro told CFO Dive in an interview. “It has to be a business value, process-oriented transformation, bringing people along.”

Driving process-first transformation

Getting buy-in from one’s team on emerging technologies like AI is one of the reasons digital transformation initiatives or rollouts can take more time.

“From an adoption standpoint, I feel like the technology is actually ahead,” Montenegro said. “It's more of...[our] ability as humans to change how we operate and adopt it fully, that is lagging.”

Montenegro joined Wolters Kluwer in 2022 as its chief strategy and innovation officer, before being appointed to her current CEO role in January, according to a company announcement at the time. Before Wolters Kluwer, she held numerous positions during an eight-year span at McKinsey & Company, including as an associate partner, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Finance chiefs today face a dual challenge when it comes to AI adoption as their role evolves into what Wolters Kluwer terms as a “performance orchestrator,” the company’s 2026 Future-Ready CFO report found.

As finance chiefs take on more strategic responsibilities, they are asked to answer key questions such as “how aggressively to invest in AI amid ROI uncertainty, how to fund growth in volatile capital markets and how to meet regulatory obligations alongside strategic imperatives,” the report found.

Meanwhile, CFOs themselves also expect AI to significantly reshape their own roles and processes within the finance function, predicting that AI and advanced analytics will spur “major transformational change” across core finance activities during the next three years.

For example, 63% of CFOs expect AI to change financial modeling, 62% expect it to alter capital allocation and 60% predict changes to scenario planning, according to the report.

Yet CFOs preparing for transformation still keep an eye on costs. The top concern cited by finance chiefs (43%) was that the implementation costs of AI will outweigh the return on investment, the report found.

Driving effective change management is one way to help bolster ROI, Montenegro said. As with most tech investments, “you lead with the investment first, and you only see the benefit a little bit later, as folks start to adopt the technology and reengineer or rework the processes to be more tech enabled,” she said.

“Companies that tend to have a much more process-centric transformation versus a tech-led transformation tend to do better in terms of driving ROI for their investments, because what you want to optimize is the process, and the technology is just an enabler for it,” she said.

Another way is to ensure those agentic AI tools can be integrated and embedded into the company’s core finance platforms, “versus sitting off to the side,” Montenegro said.

To get the “deep context” and data, agentic AI tools need to work effectively, they need to be connected to those systems, she said.

“To drive real ROI and effectiveness, you need to have that overlay, versus having disparate solutions,” she said.

Keeping pace with change

CFOs are looking to solve these key AI questions as they settle into their roles as “performance orchestrators” driving key strategic decisions for the business.

Because CFOs tend to have a “bird’s eye” view of the business, they can “more quickly connect the dots and help think through, ‘If we have a supply chain disruption in one part of the business, how is that going to affect the other functions?” Montenegro said.

Additionally, CFOs and finance teams today aren’t simply dealing with uncertainty, but with “multiple forces hitting at once,” Montenegro said. So-called “black swan” events are happening faster or with more frequency, and “the impact can be more immediate and substantial,” she said.

The accelerated pace of change is forcing the CFO role and finance function to evolve from a “reporting and compliance-centric legacy” to one of broader value creation, she said. Finance leaders are also “playing a much bigger role partnering with the CEO on resource allocation, risk management, enabling a more data driven and connected decision making process across the organization,” she said.